Policymakers 'flying blind' into the future of work

Will a robot take away my job? Many people ask that question, yet policymakers don't have the kind of information they need to answer it intelligently, say the authors of a new study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).

"Policymakers are flying blind into what has been called the fourth industrial revolution," said Tom M. Mitchell, the E. Fredkin University Professor in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, and Erik Brynjolfsson, the Schussel Family Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-chairs of the NASEM study.

Government agencies need to collect different kinds of labor data to accurately assess and predict how computer and robotic technologies will affect the workplace, Mitchell and Brynjolfsson said. Failure to do so could, at best, result in missed opportunities; at worst, it could be disastrous.

The study, "Information Technology and the U.S. Workforce: Where Are We and Where Do We Go From Here," and a related commentary by Mitchell and Brynjolfsson was published today by the journal Nature.

Information technology, artificial intelligence and robotics will affect almost all occupations, but how that will occur for each is unclear. Many people will be displaced by technology, while the demand for other jobs will increase. New industries will be born and other as-yet-unimagined jobs will be created.

These future effects likely will be larger than have already been seen, the NASEM report says, but it's hard to say definitively if technology will expand or shrink the workforce.

"There is a dramatic shortage of information and data about the exact state of the workforce and automation, so policymakers don't know answers to even basic questions such as 'Which types of technologies are currently having the greatest impacts on jobs?' and 'What new technologies are likely to have the greatest impact in the next few years?'" Mitchell said.

"Our NASEM study report details a number of both positive and negative influences technology has had on the workforce," Mitchell said. "These include replacing some jobs by automation, creating the opportunity for new types of freelance work in companies like Uber and Lyft, and making education and retraining courses available to everyone through the internet. But nobody can judge today the relative impact these different forces have made on the workforce, or their net outcome."

More research is needed to better understand these different influences of technology on the workforce, and how they will add up. Automation is better than humans at some tasks, but not all. Routine information-processing and manual tasks are readily automated, for instance, but people remain more creative and adaptable, and have better interpersonal skills. Some occupations may be reorganized accordingly and some skills that today aren't recognized or directly compensated may grow in value.

The NASEM panel recommended that to prepare students for a constantly changing workforce, schools should focus attention on those uniquely human characteristics that could differentiate people from machines in the workplace, and emphasize training in fields expected to drive the future economy.

The panel said new data sources, methods and infrastructures are necessary to support this research. In their Nature commentary, Mitchell and Brynjolfsson go further, calling for the government to create an integrated information strategy to combine public and privately held data.

"Governments must learn the lessons that industry has learned over the past decade, about how to take advantage of the exploding volume of online, real-time data to design more attractive products and more effective management policies," Mitchell said.

Similarly, he and Brynjolfsson argue, governments must shift from the current "plan then implement" paradigm for making policy, to a more iterative "sense and respond" paradigm that monitors the impacts of new policies, measures their effectiveness and adapts to optimize those policies based on their observed impacts.

Related Stories

The workplace is going to look drastically different ten years from now. The coming of the Second Machine Age is quickly bringing massive changes along with it. Manual jobs, such as lorry driving or house building are being ...

"Technophobes"—people who fear robots, artificial intelligence and new technology that they don't understand—are much more likely to be afraid of losing their jobs to technology and to suffer anxiety-related mental health ...

America's manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, ...

A tsunami of change is already arriving. Artificial intelligence is now capable of doing desk jobs that were previously safe from automation. The social and economic effects remain to be seen, but is AI what we think it is?

It just became a lot easier for educators, students, parents, policymakers and business leaders to learn more about national trends in education and jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Studying data from Twitter, University of Illinois researchers found that less people tweet per capita from larger cities than in smaller ones, indicating an unexpected trend that has implications in understanding urban pace ...

Unpacking groceries is a straightforward albeit tedious task: You reach into a bag, feel around for an item, and pull it out. A quick glance will tell you what the item is and where it should be stored.

A new online game puts players in the shoes of an aspiring propagandist to give the public a taste of the techniques and motivations behind the spread of disinformation—potentially "inoculating" them against the influence ...

It's a safe bet that some of the websites and apps you use collect and subsequently sell your personal data. But how can you know which ones? An EPFL researcher has led the development of a program that can answer that question ...

1 comment

Automation, AI, 3D printers and robotics are growing rapidly—possibly exponentially. It seems that experts don't realize that by the time someone completes college for their dream job, the machines will be doing it. Experts mistakenly believe that humans have infinite capacity to learn, create and socialize. In reality, we have very finite minds more attuned to primitive survival. If treads continue, we'll become completely obsolete for all work in a decade or so. Do you believe your mind can compete with tensor central processors, spintronics or magnetic spin-wave logic gates? These are a tiny sample of the technologies coming our way.

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.